The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History

by Hilary A. Herbert

Mr. Lincoln had remarkable political tact—he seemed to know how long to wait and when to act, and, if we may credit Mr. Welles,[85] his inflexibly honest Secretary of the Navy, he was, with the members of his cabinet, wonderfully patient and even long-suffering. And although he was the subject of much abuse, especially at the hands of Southerners who then totally misunderstood him, he was animated always by the philosophy of his own famous words, "With malice towards none, with charity for all." Never for one moment did he forget, amidst even the bitterest of his trials, that the Confederates, then in arms against him, were, as he regarded them, his misguided fellow-citizens; and the supreme purpose of his life was to bring them back into the Union, not as conquered foes, but as happy and contented citizens of the great republic.

The resources of the Confederacy and the United States were very unequal. The Confederacy had no army, no navy, no factories, save here and there a flour mill or cotton factory, and practically no machine shops that could furnish engines for its railroads. It had one cannon foundry. The Tredegar Iron Works, at Richmond, Virginia, was a fully equipped cannon foundry. The Confederacy's arms and munitions of war were not sufficient to supply the troops that volunteered during the first six months of military operations. Its further supplies, except such as the Tredegar works furnished, depended on importations through the blockade soon to be established and such as might be captured.

The North had the army and navy, factories of every description, food in abundance, and free access to the ports of the world.

The population of the North was 22,339,978.

The population of the South was 9,103,332, of which 3,653,870 were colored. The total white male population of the Confederacy, of all ages, was 2,799,818.

The reports of the Adjutant-General of the United States, November 9, 1880, show 2,859,132 men mustered into the service of the United States in 1861-65. General Marcus J. Wright, of the United States War Records Office, in his latest estimate of Confederate enlistments, places the outside number at 700,000. The estimate of Colonel Henderson, of the staff of the British army, in his "Life of Stonewall Jackson," is 900,000. Colonel Thomas J. Livermore, of Boston, estimates the number of Confederates at about 1,000,000, and insists that in the Adjutant-General's reports of the Union enlistments there are errors that would bring down the number of Union soldiers to about 2,000,000. Colonel Livermore's estimates are earnestly combated by Confederate writers.

General Charles Francis Adams has, in a recently published volume,[86] cited figures given mostly by different Confederate authorities, which aggregate 1,052,000 Confederate enlistments. What authority these Confederate writers have relied on is not clear. The enlistments were for the most part directly in the Confederate army and not through State officials. The captured Confederate records should furnish the highest evidence. But it is earnestly insisted that these records are incomplete, and there is no purpose here to discuss a disputed point.

The call to arms was answered enthusiastically in both sections, but the South was more united in its convictions, and practically all her young manhood fell into line, the rich and the poor, the cultured and uncultured serving in the ranks side by side.

The devotion of the noble women of the North, and of its humanitarian associations, to the welfare of the Federal soldiers was remarkable, but there was nothing in the situation in that section that could evoke such a wonderful exhibition of heroism and self-sacrifice as was exhibited by the devoted women of the South, who made willingly every possible sacrifice to the cause of the Confederacy.

Both sides fought bravely. Excluding from the Union armies negroes, foreigners, and the descendants of recent immigrants, the Confederates and the Union soldiers were mainly of British stock. The Confederates had some notable advantages. Excepting a few Union regiments from the West, the Southerners were better shots and better horsemen, especially in the beginning of the war, than the Northerners; and the Southerners were fighting not only for the Constitution of their fathers and the defence of their homes, but for the supremacy of their race. They had also another military advantage, that would probably have been decisive but for the United States navy: they had interior lines of communication which would have enabled them to readily concentrate their forces. But the United States navy, hovering around their coast-line, not only neutralized but turned this advantage into a weakness, thus compelling the Confederates to scatter their armies. Every port had to be guarded.